Worth: $19.00
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Cast:
Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller
Intro:
… what is most impressive about the film is its ability to render the atrocities of Auschwitz simultaneously banal and devastating.
The Zone of Interest, based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, begins with a blank, black screen. The frame lingers in darkness for some time, whilst Mica Levi’s gruesome, shrieking electronic score plays overhead.
The camera eventually cuts to a wide-shot of a family lying on the grass-covered edge of a glittering lake. They seemingly enjoy an ideal life, their strong, clean, semi-naked bodies lolling in a verdant oasis of tranquil beauty.
What’s most salient about the opening shot of Jonathan Glazer’s latest film is what it omits. As viewers soon discover, the family lying lakeside are the Hösses, Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children. What’s more, the clan live together in a house next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp, which Rudolf runs.
While the Hösses manage to protect themselves from the visual horrors of Auschwitz by perennially remaining behind the high wall that separates their home from the camp, the terrible noises emanating from the space are impossible to ignore. Certainly, the screeching in the opening scene presages the invisible violence that will come to permeate the film.
Glazer is a master at conjuring unease via sound, creating a vehement air of foreboding as Scarlett Johansson quietly drives around Scotland in Under the Skin, and a mounting sense of dread as Ben Kingsley incessantly yells through Sexy Beast. In his latest film, Glazer chiefly elicits such disquiet through Johnnie Burn’s superb sound design, the sickly hum of the camp steadily infecting the family’s secluded paradise.
Sequences of the Hösses hosting birthday parties, tending to their lush flower garden, swimming in their backyard pool and enjoying meals become insidiously intertwined with the echo of Rudolf retching in the halls of a Nazi government building, the ominous lurch of arriving trains and the faint but unmistakable sound of a child crying. In these moments, the camera remains at a relentlessly wide angle, as if the film itself were helpless to prevent the noises of the camp from seeping in.
Perhaps what is most impressive about the film is its ability to render the atrocities of Auschwitz simultaneously banal and devastating. Though Rudolf and his colleagues only casually discuss the building of a new crematorium, and Hedwig just briefly celebrates discovering diamonds in a tube of toothpaste, these snippets are profoundly jarring. With chilling precision, Glazer crystallises the Holocaust in sound and, in the process, constructs a portrait of a family that is at once shockingly ordinary and utterly abhorrent.
